Candidates from centres and peripheries and their focus on policies and services in amalgamated municipalities

Many countries across Europe experienced the merging of municipalities in recent decades. One of the consequences is the internal complexity of municipalities and emerging of centre-periphery relations. This paper aims to explore the effects of amalgamation in electoral politics. We already know that peripheries are underrepresented among both, candidates and councillors. However, we know a little about the differences in the underrepresentation between the individual parties and lists of independent candidates, and how the underrepresentation of peripheries is related to policies proposed by parties. The paper aims to explore how parties differ in composition of candidate lists and whether inclusion of candidates of peripheries is related to policies and services located in peripheries of municipalities. The research is based on the data from the Czech Republic, which is very specific case due to the very high number of municipalities and strong presence of local parties and lists of independent candidates. Czech case is also very suitable because of data availability. We know the part of municipality where the candidate lives from ballots. This information is also available in systematic manner in open data. Based on this information, we are able to find out how many candidates are from peripheral parts of municipalities and what is their position in the party list. We do not have any strong hypothesis about differences between types of parties, however we expect the more diverse lists in case of independents, because these subjects are more relying on personal connections. For the effect on policies and services, we expect that higher share of peripheral candidates and their higher rank on the ballot would be accompanied by higher focus on problems of peripheries. The focus on peripheries is measured by notices in manifesto and/or in municipal newslletters because many subjects do not have manifesto online or even at all. The analysis will be limited to sample of about 30-50 Czech municipalities due to the extensive work needed to collection the text data.